Google’s homepage is a perfect example of the company’s commitment to simplicity. But there is a reason behind this. Google’s main page is so minimal because Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t know HTML at that time. In fact for a long time you could only search by hitting the return key – it didn’t even have a submit button.

As per Marissa Mayer, (Ex Google Executive) In Google’s first user study, Stanford University students asked to search on Google would sit for 45 seconds staring at their screen, unsure what to click or how to search. Unlike many flashy websites of the late-90s, the blank homepage was so out of context in 1999 that they were just waiting for the rest of it to load. People couldn’t figure out how to use the search engine because Google.com was so simple.

10 Interesting facts about Google:

Google was named thanks to the misspelling of the word googol, which means a one followed by one-hundred zeros. Originally meant to be called “Googol,” investors spelled it “Google” on a check and it stuck.

Googleburn Doodle

Google’s famous homepage “Doodles” (Google logo graphics) are well known and enjoyed by billions around the world as a way to mark an event or anniversary. But the very first Google Doodle was designed as a kind of “out of office” message. In 1998 Brin and Page took the weekend off to go the Burning Man festival in Nevada. The Burning Man doodle was designed by the Google guys and added to the homepage to let their users know they were out of office and couldn’t fix technical issues like a server crash.

Gmail was used internally for nearly 2 years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.

Google’s first ever Twitter post was as satisfyingly geeky as you could hope for. The message, sent in February 2009, reads “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010.” For anyone not fluent in binary, here’s a hint — it’s a well known phrase from the company’s homepage. Got it? Yep, it reads: “I’m feeling lucky.”

The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, which bypasses the results page and takes users directly to the first result of their search, is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. It has been estimated to cost Google around $100 million in lost advertising revenue every year.

On average, Google has acquired more than one company every week since 2010. YouTube, Picasa, Android and Motorola are few of them.

Google Streetview Car

In 2012, Google announced that it has captured 20 petabytes of data for Street View, comprising photos taken along 5 million miles of roads, covering 39 countries and about 3,000 cities.

The world watches 450,000 years of YouTube videos each month, over twice as long as modern humans have existed. Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s more than four days of video uploaded each minute! Every month, more than 1 billion people come to YouTube.. That’s almost one out of every two people on the Internet.

Google rents out goats from a company called California Grazing to help cut down the amount of weeds and brush at Google HQ. The operation of 200 goats is kind to the environment, and as Google puts it: “A lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.

Free Lunch at Google

Google loves food. Brin and Page have said that no Googler should ever be more than 100 feet from snacks and food. If you work at the Googleplex, you can eat breakfast, lunch and dinner free of charge.